Forget Wii’s Call of Duty, Wikileaks Offers A More Realistic Representation of War

You may have heard of the classified video leaked earlier this week by Wikileaks that shows a US air crew in Baghdad on July 12th 2007 repeatedly opening fire on a group of men including Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, his driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, and on a van that stopped to rescue a then wounded Saeed Chmagh.

You may have heard, but if you haven’t seen the video yourself, I would encourage you to watch.

And why would I do such a thing? US policy calls for major censorship of images of warfare, and the result is a population that lives far removed from the realities of pain and death.

If you read more about the story altogether, you will encounter what appear to be blatant false claims made by the US military, and more painful information including the surviving wounded children in the van. Really, though, if you choose to not read more, choose to skip over the background info given in the first 2 minutes of the video, and just watch the actual footage taken from the Apache helicopter and listen to the words of those behind the guns, you will be doing yourself a great service.

Familiarize yourself with war and death. Sure, you could play Call of Duty, I suppose, but watching actual men run for their lives, crawling to safety, only to be shot again and again, hearing the words of those doing the shooting and imagining what the experience must have been like for them, will hopefully leave you with a more accurate picture of war than any video game.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Tuesday has attacked wikileaks for releasing the video, stating, “”That is the problem with these videos,” Gates said. “You are looking at the war through a soda straw and you have no context or perspective.”

I would agree. It is a serious problem. Perhaps we do lack the correct context or perspective for the wars our country is currently involved in around the globe.

5 Responses

Aaron, that is exactly what I was thinking as I read, if he is so worried that people are getting a limited view, not seeing things in context, etc., why not expose that information? Also, I saw this video a few weeks ago, but it has been helpful to be able to read the other news articles that related to it. Thanks.

I hate to say it, but as shocking and unsympathetic as the soldiers’ language was….that is how they are trained to be. I am in no way defending them or the situation. Part of their job is to be ready and able to kill things and they’ve got to be detached and desensitized to those ‘things’ in order to do it.
While I DO question their judgment, their intelligence, their compassion, the foundation of their souls….I also feel that these are people I cannot relate to whatsoever…and that makes it harder for me to judge them. They are doing a job that I don’t want to do.

I am very glad this video got out so that people can see what this Land of the Free does on a daily basis.

I really just don’t understand the top level thinking in these wars that we’ve started. While we drain resources and make MORE enemies while fighting abroad….we give little to no resources to the kids at home. If we produce nothing, how can we afford to NOT put money into producing great brains??

Do you think that our education system is PURPOSELY stacked to create castes? You live in a poor area so you get poor education so you stay poor because we need someone to stock our shelves. Is that why education is NEVER a priority here? Because if you are rich enough, your kids get a good education and, therefore, you see no need to fix anything? Your kids will become part of the ruling class and they need people to rule over.
deliberate or not do you think?